


contradictory

by catbeans



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 08:53:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12955719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catbeans/pseuds/catbeans
Summary: He realized, as Dagobah faded farther and farther back on the radar, that the Jedi being the light side and the Sith being the dark wasn't necessarily an over-simplification; all light was the same.It could take just as much as it gave, and the light side of the Force could burn just as much as the light of the suns.





	contradictory

**Author's Note:**

> i dont know what this is ive been so stuck lately but Give Me Gray Force-User Luke

Luke had always thought the negative symbolism around darkness was a bit of an oxymoron.

Tatooine hadn't given him the best impression of light--there was always too much of it, scorching skeletons left in the sand to a bleached white, sucking the moisture from the ground and the air, and it  _ burned. _

Light needed defense; it needed creams and careful, pale layers, burrowed homes to escape the heat and special coverings for electrical wires so they didn't melt when they were inevitably unearthed by the constantly shifting sand.

The dark was a refuge.

The air didn't sting against his skin and in his lungs, the horizon didn't ripple with the heat radiating from the ground, he could  _ see. _

His vision was always left splotchy during the day, even if he never looked directly at the suns, the light glaring off of the sand so brightly that he had to squint looking straight down; but even more than that, and more than the respite from the heat, he waited up at night for the stars.

The light covered everything in its path, taking as much as it gave and sometimes more than that, but the dark gave him something different, taking little else than a backseat so the rest of the galaxy could shine through.

He had never understood the stark separation between light and dark, when the light could bring so much pain, bleaching out anything that couldn't outshine it, when the dark wasn't even truly dark, lit up with specks of other solar systems and all of the  _ life _ that couldn't survive outside of a few hours of relief from the scalding light of the suns.

Being taught about the Force, he had accepted that the symbolism around light and darkness was taken to an extreme, simplified for the sake of explanation; learning about it himself, he realized that it wasn't the explanation that had been simplified so much as the concepts themselves.

Light had never been purely good, and darkness had never been purely bad.

They just were.

 

The first Death Star had been simple; there was nothing complicated about the fact that it needed to be destroyed.

For all the lives onboard, there were more that would be ended if he didn't act first--more Alderaans--and however unnerving it had been to feel all of their lights disappear, however guilty he had felt despite all attempts not to, they had made a choice.

No one on Alderaan had made that choice.

There were no children on the Death Star.

Luke knew that light took sacrifices, both literally and figuratively; Tatooine wouldn’t have been survivable at all without it, however difficult it had been, and sometimes saving lives meant having to take some first.

He could understand that.

What he couldn't understand was taking lives on his own side, his  _ friends, _ even through inaction, for nothing but the sake of duty.

He realized, as Dagobah faded farther and farther back on the radar, that the Jedi being the light side and the Sith being the dark wasn't necessarily an over-simplification; all light was the same.

It could take just as much as it gave, and the light side of the Force could burn just as much as the light of the suns.

 

With a lightsaber in hand and the knowledge that he had been lied to all his life, Luke realized that he had been given the same choice as the Stormtroopers on the first Death Star.

If he was going to align himself with the light side, he wasn't going to use it to burn.

He didn't look away from the steely black of where Darth Vader’s eyes would be under the mask when he let the lightsaber fall.

Killing wasn't the only mean to an end, and Luke had never experienced a darkness that didn't have a light to it somewhere, even if he had to search for it.

Darth Vader was no different.

He didn't expect Leia to see it--he could understand that she couldn't, without a home planet to go back to and no family left aside from him--and he didn't ask her for help.

His natural hand was blistered and raw, the glove over his prosthetic tattered and worn through by the time he finished building the pyre.

It burned through most of the night, the fumes from the heavy black suit stinging in his nose before it mixed with the sickeningly familiar smell of burning flesh, crackles and sparks popping from all the equipment built into the suit.

His knees buckled less than an hour in, his whole body aching and sore from dragging Vader’s body and assembling the pyre, and he barely felt the bruises that would be added to all the rest when his legs smacked the ground.

He held his prosthetic close to his belly, circling the fingers of his natural hand around his wrist, and he wondered how Darth Vader had come to need what no one else seemed to know was a life support system.

With all of the lies he had been told, it didn't seem like too much of a stretch for Yoda and Obi-Wan to have left that out.

 

When he got back, sneaking into the Falcon for a shower and clothes that weren't covered in dirt and soot and a smell that could only make him think of death, it felt like he had fallen out of sync with the rest of the galaxy.

The first thing Leia had told him when he told her the truth about the second Death Star was that it had to be a secret.

However unrealistic and counterproductive it really was to try to split the Force into two distinct, separate pieces, there was no room for a Jedi to be seen as sympathetic towards the Sith.

It wasn't  _ sympathy, _ he had tried to explain, the word leaving a foul taste in his mouth, but Leia had pointed out that she wasn't the only one he would have to convince, and even if she believed him, they were too solidly in the public eye for it to not have consequences.

“I can’t be connected to that,” she said, her voice tight. “I have a responsibility and I'm not going to let a dead man’s reputation get in the way of all the work that still needs to be done.”

“You weren't even there--”

“But you were,” she interrupted. “And if I'm related to you, that means I'm related to him, too, at least as far as everyone else is concerned.”

It left Luke's stomach in knots.

When he left, he went back to the refresher, and his skin was red and raw from scrubbing away the lingering smell of smoke.

 

The heavy, exhausted ache weighing his whole body down wasn't enough to get him to sleep that night.

A couple hours of tossing and turning after he had first gotten into bed, he slipped out to get dressed again, and he didn't pass anyone on his way out of the base.

It was silent except for the chirping of bugs in the trees and the soft crunch of his shoes in the dirt, the sky so clear that the light reflecting off of the moons above him was bright enough to see almost as clearly as during the day.

He walked until he couldn't anymore, stumbling to a boulder just before it felt like his legs would give out.

He straightened his back, moving his palms to his knees, but he paused.

The stars looked different than the constellations Beru had taught him on Tatooine, the angle and the placement slightly off, stars he hadn't been able to see before and darkness where he was used to seeing a twinkling speck.

He wondered how far they would have to go to still be able to see Alderaan, before the last of its light had made it as far as it would go.

He squinted up at the stars, looking slightly to the side when they blurred into the rest of the sky if he looked directly at them.

He hadn't been looking for the light left in Vader; he had known it was there--it had to be--and like with the stars, appealing to that light directly hadn't been enough.

Luke had had to prompt it out of him, had to leave him with the choice to act against his superior.

There was no way for him to get anyone to see that light if they looked directly at any of Vader’s actions before his last.

There was no way he could think of for him to express the problems with the light side, or even the problems with conceptualizing it that way, when that light burned too brightly for anything else to shine through.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, letting himself melt into the Force.

If he was the last of that light, the best he could do was soften it to a glow that would let the stars shine through the dark.

He wasn't going to burn.

**Author's Note:**

> I Cant Believe Its Not A Ship
> 
> anyway @hansolosbi dot tumbler dot com!


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